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Study Plans · Lesson 6 of 6

Breaking a score plateau

After this lesson, you can identify which study habits are causing your score plateau and replace them with the specific fixes that actually move your score.

5 min video, plus notes and 1 practice question below

In this lesson

• Recognize the obsessive testing trap: taking test after test hoping for a breakthrough usually just confirms you haven't learned the material yet, instead of teaching you anything new
• Stop leaning on someone else's explanation as a crutch, and reason through each question yourself before you check how it's explained
• Replace random, non-official prep books with real official material, since unofficial questions and their answer keys are often riddled with errors
• Write your own explanations for questions you've done, walking through the stimulus, the question stem, and all 5 answer choices, to find the traps you personally fall for
• Weight your remaining review time toward logical reasoning, since it makes up 2 of the LSAT's 3 scored sections

The obsessive testing trap

A common mistake is taking test after test, hoping the repetition alone will produce a breakthrough. In reality, that just tells you what you already know, that you haven't fully learned the material yet, and that you can. It's easy to get a quick hit of satisfaction from seeing a score, feeling good or bad about it, and moving straight to the next test.

That pattern risks burning through valuable official practice material while teaching you nothing new. Every real PrepTest you complete without reviewing it in depth is a resource you can't fully use again, which makes this habit expensive in a way that isn't obvious until you've run out of fresh material to test yourself with.

Stop leaning on explanations, reason it out yourself

The real breakthrough tends to come from slowing down. Instead of reading someone else's explanation first, reason through the question yourself before you check it. Explanations can become a crutch in your prep once you're relying on someone else to walk you through the logic rather than building that muscle yourself.

This is a hard habit to break, because reading an explanation feels productive and reasoning through a hard question on your own can feel slow and frustrating by comparison. But the slower path is the one that actually builds the skill you need on test day, when no explanation is going to be sitting next to the question.

Use only real, official material

Random hand-me-down prep books with invented LSAT-style questions are hard to write well, and both the fake questions and their answer keys often contain outright errors, which makes studying harder, not easier. It's hard enough studying for a demanding exam without also second-guessing whether the book itself made a mistake.

Stick with real official material instead: full PrepTests, sold in books of 10, or LSAC's LawHub platform, which offers over 70 official practice tests in the exact format you'll see on test day, the same platform and the same question types. The more real official questions you work through, the more you'll start to see the same reasoning patterns and the same tricks show up again and again.

Write your own explanations to find your own traps

Instead of only reading someone else's explanation, try writing your own. Walk through the stimulus, the question stem, and all 5 answer choices, the 1 right answer and each of the 4 wrong ones. Doing this across a large number of real questions reveals the specific traps built into the wrong answers, the kind that can lead you to confidently pick a wrong choice before you ever reach the correct one later in the list.

To find exactly which traps you personally fall for, apply the same review method from earlier lessons: for each miss, trace whether your misunderstanding started in the stimulus, the question stem, or the answer choices. Doing this consistently, question by question, is what turns a stack of missed questions into a clear map of your own specific weak spots.

Where to spend your remaining prep time

Under the current LSAT format, logical reasoning makes up 2 of the 3 scored sections, roughly 2/3 of your overall score, while reading comprehension is the remaining 1/3. Any real gain you make in logical reasoning carries double the weight of an equivalent gain in reading comprehension, which makes it the section where added review time tends to pay off the most as test day gets closer.

That doesn't mean ignoring reading comprehension. It means that when you're deciding where to put an extra hour this week, and the choice is between another logical reasoning review pass or another reading comprehension pass, the math favors logical reasoning, simply because whatever you fix there shows up twice on your scored sections instead of once.

The short version

• Before your next practice test, swap any non-official material for real LSAT PrepTests or LawHub, and set aside the answer key until you've reasoned through each miss yourself.
• Pick 1 question you got wrong this week and write your own full explanation, the right answer and all 4 wrong ones, before you read anyone else's.
• Split your remaining review time roughly 2 to 1 toward logical reasoning over reading comprehension, since it carries double the weight in your score.

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